For months, the Pentagon has been trying to put in place a new contract to support a “vital” program that gathers intelligence on high-value terror targets and on terrorist finance, according to contracting records released Wednesday.

Called Global Harvest, the little-known program has for years been run by defense contractor SAIC on behalf of the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency.

Global Harvest, according to a contracting document posted online, “is currently going through a Secretary of Defense-directed consolidation with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s counterterrorism and counter threat finance activities.”

That shift evidently will come with a fresh contract, which is being prepared. On Wednesday, the Air Force announced that SAIC would get a month-by-month sole-source contract extension while the DIA continues to prepare the new one.

The contracting document, a justification for a sole-source task order, provides an unusual view into the counterterrorism intelligence effort, and into how crucial SAIC has become.

The document calls Global Harvest a “vital part of the Secretary of Defense-directed and approved consolidation of counterterrorism and counter threat finance efforts.”

It says Global Harvest provides “timely, all-source, fused intelligence assessments on terrorist organizations/active and illicit finance” and is “charged with creating critical threat assessments and analysis on terrorism targets of interest.” It is unclear if these “targets of interest” are terrorists whose names are put on “kill lists” that have reportedly been approved by the White House in the controversial drone war program.

The SAIC-run program runs one-third of DIA’s threat finance intelligence analysis and “100% of the counterterrorism effort charged with dynamic threat assessments,” the document says.

Without the contract extension, the document says. “DIA will lose a significant amount of their acquired resources and will put at risk the ability to support national-level decisions on policy, as well as ongoing support to COCOMs planning and operations.”

SAIC’s monthly fee is redacted in the document posted online, though its fee for the previous eight months is reported as $6.9 million.

A spokesman for the DIA said the agency could not comment in time for publication.